Ride The Tides For Redfish Opportunity
Many details factor into a day’s outcome, but none so emphatically and predictably as the tide. Daily ebb and flow stimulate activity, impact water conditions, and control access. These regularly occurring changes affect all coastal species, but for the voracious redfish, it’s a way of life. Let’s break down the primary tidal impacts and how they influence redfish.
Activity: Slack tides allow baitfish and crustaceans to hold in positions of their choosing, but once a moving tide gains momentum, it’ll push and pull many forage species into and out of areas where redfish can find them. On the smaller scale, moving water brings tiny food items that baitfish eat, so movement means activity ,and activity never goes unnoticed by hungry predators.
Mullet are one of the most dependable indicators of productive waters, and redfish often follow them into shallow bays. You’ll actually find redfish swimming with the mullet, so once an incoming tide allows mullet to venture into an area, their very noticeable presence — lots of splashing and wiggling, along with occasional leaps — will guide you to promising areas.
Water Conditions: Whether it’s cooler water on a hot day or warmth in colder weather, incoming tides tend to make the shallows cozier for redfish and the forage they seek. In late fall and winter months, areas drained at low tide will collect the sun’s warmth, so reds enjoy a heating blanket when the water returns.
Incoming tides also bring more oxygenated water to further enliven the shallow zone. On the clarity side, rising water may stir up sediments, but that also increases feeding opportunities.
On the flipside, when falling tides drain coastal marshes, the water exits cleaner, thanks to the filtering vegetation. Baitfish often gather in the clean water pockets, so you can expect redfish and other predators to capitalize.
Access: Taking all the previous points into consideration, the most black-and-white, non-negotiable truth of daily tide cycles comes down to what they can and cannot reach. Redfish are hardy, tolerant fish that will literally scoot through inches of muddy water if food sources merit the effort, but their instinct won’t allow them to venture too far from a deep water exit.
Finding the creeks, drains, troughs, and cuts that allow redfish access to oyster bars, inner marsh zones, and other shallow vegetation edges gives you a workable plan for rising and falling water. In a nutshell, reds will march upward on rising tides and retreat to adjacent deep water on the fall.
Bait Options
Redfish will never turn down a live shrimp, pinfish, menhaden, threadfin herring or sardine on a Mustad Demon Circle Hook, so free-line your offering, or hang it under a peg float. In those deeper low-tide retreats, soaking chunks of cut bait — mullet, ladyfish, threadfin herring — on the circle hook often tempts redfish lazing away the slack tide.
On rising water, silently drifting or push poling into likely areas and sight casting to hungry reds offers a thrilling visual game. Rig your favorite soft plastic paddletail, swimbait, or jerkbait on a light Mustad Inshore Darter jig head and use low, sidearm casts to drop your bait ahead of moving fish.
Once the tide fills your area, fan casting a LIVETARGET Sardine, Pinfish, Mullet or Menhaden swimbait might connect you with a hefty red. Across the board, one of the most consistent options for high-water reds is the popping cork rig. A good option for covering broad areas, this noisy setup also does a great job of targeting marsh edges, flooded mangroves, and the deeper sides of oyster bars.
Essentially, a wire stem holds a sliding float flanked by noise-making beads. Stems include top and bottom tie-off points for your main line and a leader, the length of which you adjust for where you want the bait to sit in the water column.
Rod tip tugs cause the cork to tip over and chug, while those beads create additional noise. All this commotion directs redfish attention toward the natural or artificial bait hanging from the leader. Jigs and plastic tails definitely work, but one of the best redfish tempters you can hang below that popping cork is a LIVETARGET Rigged Shrimp.